Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days For the best part of a decade, I saw firsthand how Mubarak misruled and brutalized his people. In the fertile Nile Delta, where plants can grow so green they seem fluorescent, I visited a village where a local wealthy landowner had pushed small farmers off their land with the help of hired thugs. The villagers had appealed to the police, but the local officer had been bought off. The police reacted in the way they had grown accustomed to, as part of a system in which there was no accountability for their actions—they assaulted the most vulnerable. Police troopers raided the village, burned crops, and stole belongings. When they realized that most of the men had fled in fear of mass arrest, they beat the children. The senior officer and the landowner had hoped the villagers would be bullied into submission. When the villagers organized themselves and chose a representative to seek help in Cairo from the judiciary and human rights groups, the troopers returned to the village to track him down. When they failed, they found his wife, ripped off her clothes, and paraded her naked through the village—a warning to others who defied the powers that be. The wider world didn’t avoid seeing Mubarak’s incompetence and brutality simply because the excesses happened out of sight in the countryside. The outrages were ignored when they happened in central Cairo, too. On May 25, 2005, state security decided to escalate its use of hired thugs as a method of crowd control. Hundreds of young, largely secular left-wing activists gathered in central Cairo to protest for democratic reform. Statesecurity forces penned in the protesters and then sent in the hired goons. In the scuffles, one of the thugs was captured by the activists. I heard him tell a group of activists and journalists that he had been in a police cell the night before for pick-pocketing, but was released on the condition that he help police “rough up” people they had told him were “traitors.” Police officials, he said, promised him and the other prisoners a Coke and a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal deal as a reward. The other thugs made straight for the female protesters and ripped off their clothes and groped them as uniformed police officers watched from the sidelines. The fact that a U.S. ally was using sexual violence as a political weapon against secular “natural allies” of democracy a couple of days after the U.S. president’s wife visited the country and gave a speech on women’s rights was little reported abroad. The fact that the regime received little crit- 80
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days icism for the tactic, probably convinced Mubarak that employing it was not only cheap but effective—which explains why his regime has resorted to it time and again. As more Egyptians voiced their desire to see the end of Mubarak’s rule through the Kifaya (Enough) movement, the authorities reacted by ramping up the brutality. Activist Mohamad al-Sharqawi was tortured and raped with a broom by security officers in 2006. He was just one of many. But most observers still thought the anger would not radiate beyond a small core of activists. When I was covering the Kifaya demonstrations, a senior colleague in London, herself an Arab, told me; “Amil, forget about the Egyptians. They have been broken by Mubarak.” She sounded embittered by the disappointment of her own faith in the Egyptian people. But as shocking as these incidents were, they generated little contemplation about the nature of the Egyptian state. Political discussion points centered more on who would succeed Mubarak—his son Gamal, or his spy chief Omar Suleiman. Extremism and terrorism were a secondary concern, largely because a militant campaign by violent extremists had been violently but effectively suppressed in the 1990s. If armed extremists couldn’t topple Mubarak, the logic held, nobody could. With no wider reason to care, most Western media outlets were uninterested in the gradual decline of the Egyptian state and the increasing resentment of its people. As a journalist for a wire service, I covered the rigged elections and the angry demonstrations. We made note of the first time protesters personally singled out Mubarak as part of the problem (2003, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq). But our stories hardly ever made it into major newspapers or onto television stations. When I later worked on documentaries in London, a senior foreign editor told me that Egypt was “one of the biggest non-stories there ever was.” The feeling was that Mubarak was pro-Western, which meant that he was a “moderate”; Egypt was a story about ancient artifacts and beaches, not politics. Perhaps the biggest hindrance to generating coverage was that editors thought the issues afflicting Egypt—economic stagnation, state brutality, lost dignity—could not easily be conveyed to an audience with little interest in foreign affairs. In the end, it wasn’t about spirit; it was about pride. Mubarak knew his regime had to give Egyptians something to be proud of if it wanted to sur- 81
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